Christmas Holiday (18 page)

“Why not? On account of the Sérail?”

“Oh, no, not that. I could send them a wire to say I had influenza. It’s not fair to you.”

“That’s my business, isn’t it?”

It seemed a bit grim to Charley that he should have to persuade her to do what it was quite plain she was only too anxious to do, and what he would just as soon she didn’t. But he didn’t see how else he could act now. She gave him a searching look.

“Why should you do this? You don’t want me, do you?” He shook his head. “What can it matter to you if I live or die, what can it matter to you if I’m happy or not? You’ve not known me forty-eight hours yet. Friendship? I’m a stranger to you. Pity? What has one got to do with pity at your age?”

“I wish you wouldn’t ask me embarrassing questions,” he grinned.

“I suppose it’s just natural goodness of heart. They always say the English are kind to animals. I remember one of our landladies who used to steal our tea took in a mangy mongrel because it was homeless.”

“If you weren’t so small I’d give you a smack on the face for that,” he retorted cheerfully. “Is it a go?”

“Let’s go out and have lunch. I’m hungry.”

During luncheon they spoke of indifferent things, but when they had finished and Charley, having paid the bill, was waiting for his change, she said to him:

“Did you really mean it when you said I could stay with you till you went away?”

“Definitely.”

“You don’t know what a boon it would be to me. I can’t tell you how I long to take you at your word.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“It won’t be much fun for you.”

“No, it won’t,” he answered frankly, but with a charming smile. “But it’ll be interesting.”

She laughed.

“Then I’ll go back to Alexey’s and get a few things. At least a toothbrush and some clean stockings.”

They separated at the station and Lydia took the
Metro. Charley thought that he would see if Simon was in. After asking his way two or three times he found the Rue Campagne Première. The house in which Simon lived was tall and dingy, and the wood of the shutters showed gray under the crumbling paint. When Charley put in his head at the concierge’s loge he was almost knocked down by the stink of fug, food and human body that assailed his nostrils. A little old woman in voluminous skirts, with her head wrapped in a dirty red muffler, told him in rasping, angry tones, as though she violently resented his intrusion, where exactly Simon lived, and when Charley asked if he was in bade him go and see. Charley, following her directions, went through the dirty courtyard and up a narrow staircase smelling of stale urine. Simon lived on the second floor and in answer to Charley’s ring opened the door.

“H’m. I wondered what had become of you.”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No. Come in. You’d better keep on your coat. It’s not very warm in here.”

That was true. It was icy. It was a studio, with a large north light, and there was a stove in it, but Simon, who had apparently been working, for the table in the middle was littered with papers, had forgotten to keep it up and the fire was almost out. Simon drew a shabby armchair up to the stove and asked Charley to sit down.

“I’ll put some more coke on. It’ll soon get warmer. I don’t feel the cold myself.”

Charley found that the armchair, having a broken spring, was none too comfortable. The walls of the
studio were a cold slate-gray, and they too looked as though they hadn’t been painted for years. Their only ornament was large maps tacked up with drawing-pins. There was a narrow iron bed which hadn’t been made.

“The concierge hasn’t been up to-day yet,” said Simon, following Charley’s glance.

There was nothing else in the studio but the large dining-table, bought second-hand, which Simon wrote at, some shelves with books in them, a desk-chair such as they use in offices, two or three kitchen chairs piled up with books, and a strip of worn carpet by the bed. It was cheerless and the cold winter light coming in through the north window added its moroseness to the squalid scene. A third-class waiting-room at a wayside station could not have seemed more unfriendly.

Simon drew a chair up to the stove and lit a pipe. With his quick wits he guessed the impression his surroundings were making on Charley and smiled grimly.

“It’s not very luxurious, is it? But then I don’t want luxury.” Charley was silent and Simon gave him a coolly disdainful look. “It’s not even comfortable, but then I don’t want comfort. No one should be dependent on it. It’s a trap that’s caught many a man who you would have thought had more sense.”

Charley was not without a streak of malice and he was not inclined to let Simon put it over on him.

“You look cold and peaked and hungry, old boy. What about taking a taxi to the Ritz Bar and having some scrambled eggs and bacon in warmth and comfortable armchairs?”

“Go to hell. What have you done with Olga?”

“Her name’s Lydia. She’s gone home to get a toothbrush. She’s staying with me at the hotel till I go back to London.”

“The devil she is. Going some, aren’t you?” The two young men stared at one another for a moment. Simon leant forward. “You haven’t fallen for her, have you?”

“Why did you bring us together?”

“I thought it would be rather a joke. I thought it would be a new experience for you to go to bed with the wife of a notorious murderer. And to tell you the truth, I thought she might fall for you. I should laugh like a hyena if she has. After all, you’re rather the same type as Berger, but a damned sight better-looking.”

Charley suddenly remembered a remark that Lydia had made when they were having supper together after the Midnight Mass. He had not understood what she meant at the time, but now he did.

“It may surprise you to learn that she tumbled to that. I’m afraid you won’t be able to laugh like a hyena.”

“Have you been together ever since I left you with her on Christmas Eve?”

“Yes.”

“It seems to agree with you. You look all right. A bit pale, perhaps.”

Charley tried not to look self-conscious. He would not for the world have had Simon know that his relations with Lydia had been entirely platonic. It would only have aroused his derisive laughter. He would have
looked upon Charley’s behaviour as despicably sentimental.

“I don’t think it was a very good joke to get me off with her without letting me know what I was in for,” said Charley.

Simon gave him a tortured smile.

“It appealed to my sense of humour. It’ll be something to tell your parents when you go home. Anyhow you’ve got nothing to grouse about. It’s all panned out very well. Olga knows her job and will give you a damned good time in that way, and she’s no fool; she’s read a lot and she can talk much more intelligently than most women. It’ll be a liberal education, my boy. D’you think she’s as much in love with her husband as ever she was?”

“I think so.”

“Curious, human nature is, isn’t it? He was an awful rotter, you know. I suppose you know why she’s at the Sérail? She wants to make enough money to pay for his escape; then she’ll join him in Brazil.”

Charley was disconcerted. He had believed her when she told him that she was there because she wanted to atone for Robert’s sin, and even though the notion had seemed to him extravagant there was something about it that had strangely moved him. It was a shock to think that she might have lied to him. If what Simon said were true she had just been making a fool of him.

“I covered the trial for our paper, you know,” Simon went on. “It caused rather a sensation in England because the fellow that Berger killed was an Englishman, and they gave it a lot of space. It was a snip for me;
I’d never been to a murder trial in France before and I was pretty keen to see one. I’ve been to the Old Bailey, and I was curious to compare their methods with ours. I wrote a very full account of it; I’ve got it here; I’ll give it you to read if you like.”

“Yes, I would.”

“The murder created a great stir in France. You see, Robert Berger wasn’t an apache or anything like that. He was by way of being a gent. His people were very decent. He was well-educated and he spoke English quite passably. One of the papers called him the Gentleman Gangster and it caught on; it took the public fancy and made him quite a celebrity. He was good-looking too, in his way, and young, only twenty-two, and that helped. The women all went crazy over him. God, the crush there was to get into the trial! It was a real thrill when he came into the court-room. He was brought in between two warders for the press photographers to have a go at him before the judges came in. I never saw anyone so cool. He was quite nicely dressed and he knew how to wear his clothes. He was freshly shaved and his hair was very neat. He had a fine head of dark brown hair. He smiled at the photographers and turned this way and that, as they asked him to, so that they could all get a good view of him. He looked like any young chap with plenty of money that you might see at the Ritz Bar having a drink with a girl. It tickled me to think that he was such a rogue. He was a born criminal. Of course his people weren’t rich, but they weren’t starving, and I don’t suppose he ever really wanted for a hundred francs. I wrote a rather
pretty article about him for one of the weekly papers, and the French press printed extracts from it. It did me a bit of good over here. I took the line that he engaged in crime as a form of sport. See the idea? It worked up quite amusingly. He’d been almost a first-class tennis-player and there was some talk of training him for championship play, but oddly enough, though he played a grand game in ordinary matches, he had a good serve and was quick at the net, when it came to tournaments he always fell down. Something went wrong then. He hadn’t got power of resistance, determination or whatever it is, that the great tennis-player has got to have. An interesting psychological point, I thought. Anyhow his career as a tennis-player came to an end because money began to be missed from the changing-room when he was about, and though it was never actually proved that he’d taken it everyone concerned was pretty well convinced that he was the culprit.”

Simon relit his pipe.

“One thing that peculiarly struck me in Robert Berger was his combination of nerve, self-possession and charm. Of course charm is an invaluable quality, but it doesn’t often go with nerve and self-possession. Charming people are generally weak and irresolute, charm is the weapon nature gives them to cope with their disadvantages; I would never set much trust in anyone who had it.”

Charley gave his friend a slightly amused glance; he knew that Simon was belittling a quality he did not think he possessed in order to assure himself that it
was of no great consequence beside those he was convinced he had. But he did not interrupt.

“Robert Berger was neither weak nor irresolute. He very nearly got away with his murder. It was a damned smart bit of work on the part of the police that they got him. There was nothing sensational or spectacular in the way they went about the job; they were just thorough and patient. Perhaps accident helped them a little, but they were clever enough to take advantage of it. People must always be prepared to do that, you know, and they seldom are.”

An absent look came into Simon’s eyes, and once more Charley was aware that he was thinking of himself.

“What Lydia didn’t tell me was how the police first came to suspect him,” said Charley.

“When first they questioned him they hadn’t the ghost of an idea that he had anything to do with the murder. They were looking for a much bigger man.”

“What sort of a chap was Jordan?”

“I never ran across him. He was a bad hat, but he was all right in his way. Everybody liked him. He was always ready to stand you a drink, and if you were down and out he never minded putting his hand in his pocket. He was a little fellow, he’d been a jockey, but he’d got warned off in England, and it turned out later that he’d done nine months at Wormwood Scrubs for false pretences. He was thirty-six. He’d been in Paris ten years. The police had an idea that he was mixed up in the drug traffic, but they’d never been able to get the goods on him.”

“But how did the police come to question Berger at all?”

“He was one of the frequenters of Jojo’s Bar. That’s where Jordan used to have his meals. It’s rather a shady place patronized by bookmakers and jockeys, touts, runners and the sort of people with the reputation that we journalists describe as unsavoury, and naturally the police interviewed as many of them as they could get hold of. You see, Jordan had a date with someone that night, that was shown by the fact that there were a couple of glasses on the tray and a cake, and they thought he might have dropped a hint about whom he was going to meet. They had a pretty shrewd suspicion that he was queer, and it was just possible one of the chaps at Jojo’s had seen him about with someone. Berger had been rather pally with Jordan, and Jojo, the owner of the bar, told the police he’d seen him touch the bookie for money several times. Berger had been tried on a charge of smuggling heroin into France from Belgium, and the two men who were up with him went to jug, but he got off somehow. The police knew he was as guilty as hell, and if Jordan had been mixed up with dope and had met his death in connection with that, they thought Berger might very well know who was responsible. He was a bad lot. He’d been convicted on another charge, stealing motor-cars, and got a suspended sentence of two years.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Charley.

“His system was as simple as it was ingenious. He used to wait till he saw someone drive up to one of the big stores, the Printemps or the Bon Marché, in a
Citroën, and go in, leaving it at the kerb. Then he’d walk up, as bold as brass, as though he’d just come out of the store, jump in and drive off.”

“But didn’t they lock the cars?”

“Seldom. And he had some Citroën keys. He always stuck to the one make. He’d use the car for two or three days and then leave it somewhere, and when he wanted another, he’d start again. He stole dozens. He never tried to sell them, he just borrowed them when he wanted one for a particular purpose. That was what gave me the idea for my article. He pinched them for the fun of the thing, for the pleasure of exercising his audacious cleverness. He had another ingenious dodge that came out at the trial. He’d hang around in his car about the bus stops just at the time the shops closed, and when he saw a woman waiting for a bus he’d stop and ask her if she’d like a lift. I suppose he was a pretty good judge of character and knew the sort of woman who’d be likely to accept a ride from a good-looking young man. Well, the woman got in and he’d drive off in the direction she wanted to go, and when they came to a more or less deserted street he stalled the car. He pretended he couldn’t get it to start and he would ask the woman to get out, lift the hood and tickle the carburettor while he pressed the self-starter. The woman did so, leaving her bag and her parcels in the car, and just as she was going to get in again, when the engine was running, he’d shoot off and be out of sight before she realized what he was up to. Of course a good many women went and complained to the police, but they’d only seen him in the dark, and all they could
say was that he was a good-looking, gentlemanly young man in a Citroën, with a pleasant voice, and all the police could do was to tell them that it was very unwise to accept lifts from good-looking, gentlemanly young men. He was never caught. At the trial it came out that he must often have done very well out of these transactions.